[Heather L.L. FitzGerald] Staying Grounded While We’re Grounded

With the current COVID quarantine situation, the world feels trapped in a monochromatic grey scale. It might be spring outside, but fears and anxieties are robbing us of vibrancy and joy–like wearing a permanent pair of darkly tinted glasses. We’ve all been grounded indefinitely!

I know I’ve personally slipped into thoughts of despair over the last several weeks, though my own routine hasn’t changed terribly. As an empty-nester and a writer, I’m pretty much home alone every day. My introverted self is quite comfortable with this arrangement. Still, it doesn’t take but a few minutes of news or reading a friend’s sad post about their loved one who has tested positive, and I find myself feeling a little hopeless.

Sound familiar?

As God’s providential timing would have it, I committed to a discipleship group through my church, just before this virus began its ominous visit. In fact, the first meeting I was to attend had to be handled via FaceTime because our city had just implemented a shelter-at-home order. But our little foursome is committed to meeting, and the wonders of technology are keeping us in touch.

Until I joined this group, my time with the Lord could be labeled as ‘hit or miss’. Though I was regularly in the Word, I wasn’t particularly intentional or focused about my reading. This commitment with my discipleship group has given structure to my quiet time and has helped to infuse each morning with a solidarity of hope and trust in God’s mysterious ways.

Reading the Bible through the lens of this pandemic has been a fresh revelation on how relevant and current scripture remains. God is neither surprised nor overwhelmed by this situation, as I have been. Between stories of God’s deliverance in Egypt or His loving rescue and call in the life of a prostitute, the Lord is faithful to hear our cry and send help. He has not abandoned us and will never forsake us, and not one of us is beyond redemption.

Does that mean we Christians will be untouched by this COVID tragedy? Not at all. It doesn’t take but a cursory read through scripture to see that his people suffer too. But suffering with hope is WORLDS apart from suffering without it. Knowing our Savior suffered incomprehensibly for our sin should give us strength to endure our temporary troubles.

While the enemy is doing his best to distract us with negative news, toilet paper shortages, and stir crazy kids—plus much bigger things like illness, isolation, and depression—let’s not let our focus shift or our faith shrivel. Y’all…this takes effort and intentionality! Reach out to a few friends and hold each other accountable to read the Word together, ask how it can be applied to your life, and pray for one another’s burdens.

Our little group ‘meets’ at 6:30 in the morning, once a week. One gal is in her bathroom so she doesn’t disturb her sleeping kids. We’re applying the layout suggested in Disciple Her by Kandi Gallaty. Using the acronym HEAR and a journal we: HIGHLIGHT a scripture that spoke to us from our daily reading, we EXPLAIN what we read (just writing a brief explanation goes far toward internalizing the Word and sparking memory), then we describe how we can APPLY it to our lives, and finally we RESPOND by asking the Lord to help us live it out.

There is a plethora of Bible reading plans to choose from, so pick one and get after it! You can decide between yourselves how many days a week you are going to read the designated plan, but put it in writing and commit to it. Oh! And don’t forget to have a short memory verse that you can work on together. Find a beautiful meme online with a favorite scripture—share it, and learn it. We always begin our meeting by quoting the last week’s verse together. (Feel free to start with the few I’ve shared here).

Friends! We need each other more than ever. We need fellowship and relationships that are deeper than Facebook comments and phone texts. And much more than that, we need to sink deep roots into the Word of God. It’s the only thing that will last. It’s the only thing that we can cling to that will never fail us. It is the only thing that is able to conquer fear and loneliness and, yes, even COVID19.

Let’s emerge from our isolation-cocoons as strong, beautiful butterflies that have learned to flourish and overcome adversity ‘by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony’. As everything gets stripped away, it is truly all we have that’s lasting.

How have you been coping? Do you need prayer? Are you unsure of how to connect to fellow like-minded believers? Maybe we can get you connected even here! Leave a comment below and let’s join our virtual (sanitized) hands with one another and with our great and sovereign God.